Mixed Fiction

SHADOW ON THE WATERS, by Jack Thomas Leahy (241 pp. Knopf; $4), recalls that, as the world's last frontiers recede, so does the myth of the noble savage. People who are called savage are all too anxious to become civilized: people who are civilized have shown that the sav age left in them is anything but noble. In his first novel, the author seeks to restore the old image and picks the Northwest Indians as his noble savages; they prove too pathetic to offer an alternative to civilization, only a mild reproach.

Into the Indian community of Teawhit, on the coast of Washington, comes young Jerrod Tobin, whose family moved there in the late 1940s to open a store. An endlessly fascinating playground is revealed to him by his Indian chum, Buckety, who first greets him: "We can be brothers and cross ourselves with clam juice and chicken blood to prove it." Woven into the boys' Huck Finn adventures is a darker tale of the Indians' past. From his grandfather, Jerrod learns of the Indians' once robust life, of how they hunted whales in canoes and dragged the carcasses back to shore as the symbol of their power.

By novel's end. the violent past has caught up with the placid present. The Indians are soon corrupted by the liquor that Jerrod's father illegally sells them. Civilization intrudes in other ways; a hard-boiled woman reporter publicizes Teawhit, drawing crowds of bumptious tourists, and con men stage a carnival and a rodeo--cheap shows that fake what once was real and vital. In the first of a series of almost ceremonial deaths, one Indian rams his model T into an imitation totem pole. Little Buckety dies when he falls off a bronco at the rodeo. Author Leahy's Indians prove too willing victims of civilization. But between the indifferent sea and the mountains, the Indians and little Jerrod eke out a few moments of great tenderness.

THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES, by Harry Brown (362 pp.; Knopf; $4.50), is based on an intriguing idea. The author evidently meant to rescue the cowhand from the raunchy cliche of sex and six-shot violence, hoping to demonstrate that the Western hero can hold his own with the Homeric. Arch Eastmere, the tall, silent type home from a couple of seasons of dark adventure in the South, is a mean hand with a hair-trigger .45. He makes a natural enough Achilles. Percy Randal, the grey old rancher, proud of his sons and his stock-rich kingdom, is clearly Priam. Golden-haired Ellen Lacy, wife of one of Randal's younger rivals, may be no match for Helen, but in the woman-starved region around the Broken S, her barren beauty is "the lodestar for this small galaxy called the Forkhandle country ... ox-eyed and unaware of the magnet her aureate flesh concealed." When the Paris of the piece starts tossing his good looks around, a range war results, friend kills vengeful friend, and fate contrives grim endings as it did before the walls of Troy.

The trouble is that Author Brown, noted for a good World War II novel, A Walk in the Sun, seems to have lost faith in his audience. Lest the reader miss the parallels, he tells his tale in the pidgin poetry of the conventional translator. What he has set out to do, says the author, is tell of "a yellow Sunday in the last days of a good spring, while . . . pale threads, drawn out from dark hidden places, began to be wound inexorably together . . . until there had been wrought, out of such tenuous white and fleeting things, a taut tripwire for the souls of men, destined, before its mindless work was done, to bring many tall sure riders down to earth, and below.'' Burdened with such prose, the skeleton of a good shoot-em-up also comes rattling to earth--and below.

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